Sheryl Sandberg: Future Moms Are Wrecking Their Own Careers

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg argues in a controversial new
book that women's lack of commitment, even before they have a
family, is why so few make it to the top. Is she right?

In a sea of blue and black, Sheryl Sandberg, a vivacious brunette
in an orange jacket, stood out. Intense, engaged, gesturing for
emphasis, Facebook’s chief operating officer and one of the most
influential women in global business, was intent on getting her
message across.

“We know the childbearing years are a challenge for women, [for
companies] to keep them, we know that,” Sandberg said. ''How many
managers in this audience have sat down with a woman – who has
not mentioned it to you [before] – and said, 'You may want to
have a child one day, I want to talk to you about that. Are you
thinking of having children?’ Who’s done that?”

Among the hundreds of chief executives attending the session at
the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, last week not a single hand was raised.

“Every HR department tells you not to do that,” nodded Sandberg.
“But how are we going to get women through that frame if we can’t
have that conversation?”

But rather than reinforcing firms’ grumbles over maternity leave,
her point was that more openness could actually help women
themselves, as well as helping companies plan staffing and
maternity leave.

If that suggestion raised eyebrows, Sandberg’s take on another
issue concerning women in the workplace is likely to prove much
more controversial: could women be doing more to promote their
own success? Do their plans for family life mean women are
wrecking their own careers – even before they have begun?

The book in which Sandberg lays out her arguments, Lean In:
Women, Work and the Will to Lead will be published in March,
but it is already causing a stir across the Atlantic.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking
self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back
when we should be leaning in,” Sandberg writes, according to a
preview in the New York Times. “We internalise the negative
messages we get throughout our lives, the messages that say it’s
wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men. We
lower our own expectations of what we can achieve.”

As a result, she says many women are quietly checking out of
their careers, years before they actually start a family. She
believes women rarely make a sweeping decision to give up work to
look after children, but instead make a string of choices from
early on that propel them towards that end result, none the less.

“Maybe it’s the last year of med school when they say, 'I’ll take
a slightly less interesting speciality because I’m going to want
more balance one day,’” she has said. “Maybe it’s the fifth year
in a law firm when they say, 'I’m not even sure I should go for
partner[ship at the firm], because I know I’m going to want kids
eventually.’ These women don’t even have relationships, and
already they’re finding balance, balance for responsibilities
they don’t yet have. And from that moment, they start quietly
leaning back [from their careers]. The problem is, often
they don’t even realise it.”

At Davos she won a global audience for her views, which is likely
to be reinforced by the Lean In Org, a social media movement in
development.

Sandberg will be listened to: she is a woman who walks her talk.
The first female on Facebook’s board, her $30million-plus (£19m)
pay packet in 2011 made her the social media giant’s best-paid
executive – not to mention her share options, which run into
millions of dollars. This follows senior roles as chief of staff
for the US Treasury Department (1996-2001) and at Google
(2001-2008).

Family life – she is a mother of two – is important to her. She
famously leaves the office – although it is not necessarily the
end of her working day – at 5.30pm. Her husband, Dave Goldberg, a
Silicon Valley entrepreneur, leaves work at the same time and has
commented wryly that “nobody asks me about it”.

So, does Sandberg hold the answers? Those wanting to see women
better represented in senior jobs know there is some way to go.
While Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, this week boasted that
only seven firms in the prestigious FTSE 100 index now have
all-male boards, the unspoken caveat is that just two out of
those 100 corporate giants are led by a woman.

Research shows that even when men and women enter a company in
equal proportions, the number of women drops the higher up you
get. Rather than focusing on the glass ceiling, the talk now is
of a “cliff” – not at the top, but in the middle – which women
fall off when they have a family.

In this context, Sandberg’s call is striking a chord. At
that Davos session, Christine Lagarde, who as head of the
International Monetary Fund is one of the world’s most powerful
women, was shaken out of the usual generalities and platitudes to
get personal.

“When you say you leave your job at 5.30, Sheryl … you dare the
difference,” she told Sandberg, praising her for resisting the
pressure to fit in. “When I was raising my kids, I was not going
to work at my law firm on Wednesday afternoon. I was taking a
risk at the time. [But] who cared? I did the job, I followed
clients’ business, I delivered.”

And yet, Sandberg’s message is not being received with universal
acclaim. While she makes it clear that organisations play a
critical role and may be guilty of “the overt discrimination, the
non-overt discrimination, the lack of flexibility”, her solution
is more focused on ''a much more open dialogue about gender”.

“I think we need to… understand that the stereotypes that start
in childhood hold us back in the professional world, and start
having a much more open conversation,” she said in Davos. “Think
of it like a marathon. Everyone’s cheering the men on. The
messages for women are different: are you sure you want to run,
don’t you want to run, don’t you have kids at home? We have to
talk about this.’’

Try looking for a working mother, she told her audience, in
“movies, TV, anything… who has a job and kids, who is not
frazzled, [thinking] she can’t do it, breaking down, getting
divorced. There are none.”

For Sandberg, even in these supposedly more enlightened times,
this gender bias takes hold early on. She points to T-shirts for
babies bearing the message “Smart Like Daddy” for boys and
“Pretty Like Mummy” for girls. Studies show that as a man climbs
the professional ladder he is seen as more likeable, while the
opposite holds for a woman. “That starts with those T-shirts,”
she said.

All well and good, say her critics, but calling for a change in
mindset ignores the very real obstacles facing working mothers.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first female policy director at the US
State Department, has complained that “Sandberg’s exhortation
contains more than a note of reproach. We who have made it to the
top, or are striving to get there, are essentially saying to the
women in the generation behind us: 'What’s the matter with you?’”

What is the matter is that they are comparing themselves with
“genuine superwomen”,
was Slaughter’s blunt assessment . “Consider Sandberg
herself, who graduated with the prize given to Harvard’s top
student of economics,’’ she added. ''These women cannot possibly
be the standard against which even very talented professional
women should measure themselves.”

Rather than just encourage young women to reach for the stars,
Slaughter calls for practical measures that will actually help
them to combine career and family life: making school schedules
better match the working day, for example.

And yet, one of our home-grown “superwomen” thinks Sandberg is on
to something. Helena Morrissey, the mother-of-nine who manages
billions of pounds as head of Newton Investment Management, sees
a “vicious spiral” at work, where women get discouraged from
“leaning in” to their careers by a working environment they see
as stacked against them.

“I hope Sandberg’s book will help and not be seen as blaming
women for the problem,” she said. “There’s clearly a shared
responsibility of women to 'lean in’, as she puts it - but also
for corporate culture to be conducive to encourage women to do
that.”

Even if she fails to win over her critics, Sheryl Sandberg is
trying hard to move the women and workplace debate on to new
ground and air issues that have been marked out as ''no go
areas’’ by employment regulations.

At Davos she described how her own lawyer tried to block an
article she wrote telling women to “lean in before they have
children”, in case she was fell foul of legislation. “Wait a
minute, he works for me,” she remembered, before deciding to
publish and be damned.

“If someone wants to sue me for gender discrimination because I’m
talking to women about childbearing, go ahead,” she said. “No one
talks about this and companies don’t talk about this. And we need
to see the cost of this – and change it.”

Lean in: Women, Work and the Will to Lead by Sheryl
Sandberg (WH Allen, £20) is available to pre-order from Telegraph Books (0844 871
1514) at £18 + £1.35 p&p